The Chariots of Ra

by Kenneth Bulmer

Genres: Science Fiction; Alien Contact; Space Opera

Synopsis

The chariots came on at great speed and there was no mistaking their purpose. Tulley wondered if they were using this place as a base . . . Then an arrow plunked into the parapet of his chariot. Oolou lashed the reins. The nageres sprang forward. With suicidal speed the two chariot groups closed on each other. Tulley swallowed down, feeling the dryness in his throat, loosed a shaft at the oncoming mass. There must be twenty chariots out there . . . He glanced at Oolou, shouting. She stared back at him with a ghastly grin, the blood pouring from her neck above the corselet where an arrow stood, stark and brutal. The Chariots of Ra is a parallel worlds adventure novel, set in Kenneth Bulmer's 'Keys to the Dimensions' series.

Release date: June 11, 2012

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 320

Sample

When the wipers gave up and squealed across the windshield for the last time the blacktop and the bordering telephone posts disappeared behind a silver-writhing curtain of rain. Roy Tulley pulled the brand new Cadillac across onto the shoulder and cut the motor. He blinked his eyes. Through the side window reflections of the four headlights jumped and whirled in the unceasing downpour.

“Now what?” asked Graham Pike from the passenger seat.

“It was your idea to push on past KC tonight,” pointed out Tulley without heat.

“If we deliver this heap to the west coast ahead of schedule we catch a bonus,” said Pike.

Thunder and lightning boomed and sizzled.

“And,” went on Tulley, calmly, “it was your idea to take this godsforsaken route through the back of nowhere.”

“That guy swore it was the best route. He told me we’d save ten percent on gas.”

“That’s your trouble, Gray. You’re too credulous. You’d believe anything.”

“You’re the electronics expert, Roy. You could fix the wipers in nothing flat.”

“Great!” Tulley’s cool began to warm. “Like most credulous people you’re unscrupulous with it. There’s a mean streak in you, Gray Pike. You’re as much an expert as I am! You get wet fixing the wipers.”

They glared at each other with the old comradeship of rivalry that had been with them since grade school. They had sat in the same classrooms, listened to the same teacher, played on the same team, taken from their university tutors, each in his different way, joined the same computer corporation on the same day and been fired on the same day last week. The rain still hissed down.

“Stalemate, then,” said Pike, with a yawn.

Tulley looked at him, at the rain, at the back seat.

“At least they gave us a Caddy.”

“You won’t get all that wet, Roy.”

“Wet enough. It’s going to be a long night.”

“Toss for it.”

“Hah!” Tulley snorted with the contempt of long and painful experience. “With you—the twistiest trickster this side of the Rockies?”

“Can I help it if I know a trick or three?”

They were both large loose-limbed young men with an easy air about them that redundancy from a position they had assumed secure could not quell. Somewhere on the fabled west coast, they felt sure, lay a fresh start and a new life. Their parents back in Sharon had been tolerant enough to know when to let youthful high spirits—that’s how the oldsters phrased it—burgeon. Time enough, they’d said, to settle down. Both Pike and Tulley were mature enough to be thankful for their parents’ attitude. The times were enough out of joint without added foul-ups like that in a guy’s life.

“All right.” Roy Tulley decided he’d make a fresh fool of himself and risk it with Graham Pike. They couldn’t sit here all night. Their mutual stubbornness made that a not unlikely outcome. “But if you twist me, Gray, so help me—”

“Now would I do a thing like that to a pal!”

“You, Graham Pike, being you, would and you damn well know it!”

Pike chuckled and tossed. The coin flashed once in the headlights’ rain-soaked reflections, fell, was trapped.

“Heads,” said Tulley, knowing as soon as he spoke he’d chosen wrong.

“Yep, Roy,” nodded Pike with sorrowful satisfaction. “You’ve gone and done it again. Out you go.”

Tulley pulled his collar up and got out. The rain hit him with a personal affront. He lifted the hood. “At that, the engine is still there,” he grunted. “That’s something.”

Powerful headlights blossomed through the lines of rain and a large articulated truck pulled up with hissing of brakes and squealing of tyres. A thick beefy voice called.

“In trouble? Want any help?”

Tulley looked up with the rain bouncing off his face. His surprise was complete.

In the rain-soaked darkness the driver was invisible; but Tulley wondered if he wore his halo at a slant.

“Just the wipers,” he shouted back. “Nothing serious.”

The driver opened his cab door and stepped down. Tall, he topped Tulley’s height by three inches, and the breadth of shoulder beneath a short coat emphasised the bent-gorilla strength in him. “Let’s take a look.”

A flashlight beam cut across Tulley, swung to the Cadillac, picked out Pike’s white face at the window.

“Just the two of you?”

A breeze tickled Tulley’s spine.

He heard the truck’s gate fall with a crash. Shadows moved. He couldn’t make out the exact size and shape of the people back there; but they looked strange.

Pike let out a yell, flung open his door and hared off down the blacktop.

Something rippled past Tulley, going like a greyhound, making a slobbering sucking noise as it went.

Tulley yelled.

The things were all over him.

In fragmentary glimpses as clubs crunched down he saw round and slimy bodies as big as bullocks moving with deceptive speed on twin bunches of tendrils coiling across the ground. Other tendrils sprouted from the things’ top sections, some tentacles sprouting eyes at their tips, others ears, others mouths serrated with buzz-saw teeth. Other tentacles brandished the clubs that beat down and put out the lights for Roy Tulley.

He came around to a swaying motion and a feeling that someone—or something—had taken his head off and sewn it back upside down and back to front. He opened his eyes blearily and looked at the interior of a truck, the aluminium corrugations bare and stark. He was lying on the bed of the truck, his hands looped together by some silky netlike rope. He could hear groans and curses and a woman was screaming on a high falsetto that added to his own feeling of hysteria. He was stark naked.

The—things—sat back on their tentacular lower coils, quiescent, the skin a flushed pink, wide pores oozing a fluid that, Tulley guessed, enabled them to slide over the ground like snails. But their speed matched that of greyhounds, not snails: he remembered the way that thing had galloped past him after Pike.

There were eight people in the truck, all naked, all roped to one another, all, like him, evidently under the impression that they shared a nightmare.

Pike had been roped to a burly man whose stomach sagged and whose chest frizz of hair was greying. His once florid face looked now just like a chunk of misshapen putty. Next to him two girls, young and, without their clothes, just ordinary girls, sobbed bitterly, holding each other like baby monkeys.

“You all right, Gray?” he managed to choke out.

Pike rolled an eye at him. The other was green, mauve, black, magenta, already shut and promising to be the mother and father of all shiners.

“Ask a tomfool question—” Pike said, huffily.

“Have we flipped?”

“No. This is real. And so are they.” He nodded at the five monsters.

Of the three other people in the truck, two looked like husband and wife. They just sat together, holding each other, their heads down, bodies pressed together, not saying a word. The last woman was the one doing the screaming. A big busty blonde whose wig had slipped and whose mascara was streaking her plump cheeks in the runnels of her tears, she rocked backwards and forwards hardly caring how her freed anatomy betrayed her, groaning and screaming and barking by turn.

Tulley summed them all up, said: “Not a lot of strength in the back line, Gray.”

“Interference.” Pike said succinctly. “We’ll carry the ball.” As was to be expected, he had adjusted to the situation and what would be required.

The truck stopped. The monsters herded the people out. Roped together they stumbled and fell down the tail gate. It had not been uncomfortably cold inside; now the chilly rain hit them, the wind flicked around their flanks, the cold struck them cruelly. Through the rain-lashed darkness all Tulley could see were wide-open expanses of nothing. The truck ran off the blacktop, jolting over the shoulder and along a rough track, muddy and swilling with water. The monsters clubbed the humans into following.

Pike jerked at the silvery netlike ropes around his wrists.

“This stuff is strong. I can’t break it.”

“If you could they wouldn’t have used it.”

In the middle of wet muddy nothingness the truck stopped. Two men alighted from the cab. One of them, the driver, became momentarily visible as he walked through the headlights’ beams. There was something odd about him. He wore a black slouched hat pulled low over his forehead. The other man wore some sort of flying helmet of an old-fashioned kind, like a Balaclava, in leather. Metal glinted from it.

They vanished. Moments later they appeared at the side of the truck and the driver climbed in. The other man stood away and made motioning movements with his arms. The truck ground forward in low gear.

The blackness beyond the truck’s hood seemed to Tulley to be even blacker than the rest of the black rain-battered night. It seemed to him, standing there naked and frozen and roped to other naked and freezing humans, that the truck moved forward into a jet pit of emptiness. Then Tulley gasped. No rain slanted in the space before the truck. It ground slowly on and the fender vanished. The hood followed. The wheels disappeared. Now the long corrugated aluminium flank of the articulated truck vanished as though being swallowed up by some gigantic inhuman mouth. The hysterical woman stopped screaming. Everyone looked and no one believed.

The truck moved forward in that emptiness and vanished as though entering a tunnel to hell.

The man shouted something and the monsters rippled their tendrils over the rain-drenched earth. They forced the humans to walk after the truck. Now Tulley could see there indeed was an impalpable blackness there that cut off the rain, a solid darkness of reality, a tunnel, an opening from this earth into—into somewhere.

With a blow from a cudgel across his back Roy Tulley stepped into the portal of darkness.

“It’s no good saying you don’t believe it,” said Pike crossly to the two young girls. “It’s happening. We’re here, wherever here is. You’ve got to believe it.”

They stood huddled together. Tulley stared about him. He agreed with what Graham had said; but it was darned hard to comply.

Although the sky remained dark and overcast with no stars visible, the rain had stopped. That, at the least, was something positive to be grateful for. A gentle night wind whispered about them, the susurration broken as the truck’s engine barroomed. Herded onto the road again the people lined up waiting. They had to help themselves climb aboard, a painful business of naked skin scraping hard steel and wood, banging on the aluminium treads. The plump blonde had given over screaming now and she even pushed her wig straight and wriggled here fat shoulders, getting comfortable against one of the few burlap sacks. “Strange,” Pike said to Tulley as they flopped down. “There always seems to be a scared blonde floating about a scene like this.”

Tulley had recognised the attitude Graham would take up, an attitude similar to his own and one stemming from a certain kind of hard-edged, independent, open-eyed childhood. So long as they had their health and strength they’d keep their wits about them, take anything that offered, thump the wrong-’uns when the opportunity offered, seek always for the giggle in face of disaster, and, in short, live life like men.

“Scared blonds of fiction,” he said. “Well, anyone’s a right to be off track in a scene like this.”

The truck started up. Tulley looked back. The road was not as firmly metalled as the good old U.S. road they had left; the truck jounced. They whistled past a vehicle. Tulley stared. The body curved like a shell, four spindly wheels towered, se. . .